Climate Change

Food Just Won’t Grow Anymore

It is coming sooner than we think.

Lettuce was amazing in June, but only in June. After that; zero.

This is my first-hand story from the summer of 2021 and the lesson I learned this year. There will come a time when crops will fail globally which simply means one thing: hunger.

And that time is coming much sooner than we suppose.

To say that the summer of 2021 was batshit crazy is an understatement. Heat domes entered the common vocabulary, people in Canada and Siberia began shopping for air-conditioning devices. July 2021 is the hottest month in the recorded history or second for Europe. And these are merely the highlights.

Here in Slovenia we’ve had almost three months of abnormally hot and dry weather, starting in late May and continuing almost to the end of August. Late June, July and early August was just one heat wave after another.

So how did the plants react? What was gardening like?

It began great. I sowed chicory and lettuce on June 7th and by June 25th we’ve already had our first bowl of fresh salad out of it. It took only 18 days from seed to the table, which was mind-bending for me. This is what it looks like when conditions are perfect; weather was hot (but not too hot), soil still retained some moisture and days were long, giving plants about 16…